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I live near the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, right on the edge of a vast high plain, the rolling prairie that makes up the heart of this country. And nobody lives out there.

Which is obviously not true. Because the last two trips I took out to the prairie, I hit road construction. And that’s when you find out exactly how many people live in the tiny towns and farms of eastern Colorado. More than you might think. And you learn this by waiting for them to pass you on a one-lane road lined with orange traffic cones and large equipment.

Here’s the thing. They’re actually widening the road. Most of these highways have been one lane each way for years. Now that we and all of the other carpetbaggers have moved in, they need to widen the roads to make room for more people traveling back and forth. But in order to do that, for a while, they actually narrow the road. They need the space to work, for the equipment to park while they clear brush by the roadside and lay down gravel and pave–and for our safety, too, so we don’t go careening into the workers. But it’s a pain in the ass. Because instead of one lane each way, for a few months, we have to deal with one lane, period.

Right now, I am learning a new way to eat. I’ve limited meat and dairy and wheat. And right now, it’s really hard to find stuff that I can eat that I actually want. I know that it will be a good thing for my body in the long run. But it’s a pain in the ass. We’re also potty training Jack (again), and teaching him to be more independent, in general. In order to stop doing everything for him ourselves, we have to teach him how to do it himself — zipping and buttoning and putting the paste on the toothbrush and even wiping his butt. And if you’ve ever had to do any of that, you know the truth. That’s a pain in the ass, too.

And Brian and I are also learning to reach out and contact people in our community and start making friends. And let me tell you — that’s a pain in the ass, too. I never thought I’d ever say to anyone, ever, that I have a hard time making friends. But there you have it.

This reminds me of Liz Gilbert’s new book, Big Magic, which Brian and I are both reading right now, about creativity and making a way for yourself as an artist in any form. She has a section in there that asks, exactly what flavor of shit sandwich would you like to eat? Because the truth is, no matter what you want to do, even if you are lucky enough to have found your true calling and vocation, you will always, always have stuff to do that you don’t like. So the question really is, what kind of shit sandwich do you want to eat? Do you want to teach English but have to grade papers all night? Do you want to write for a living but have to revise? Do you want to own your own business but have to deal with the uncertainty of an irregular paycheck?

So here’s my point. I know you’ve been wondering. Whenever we start something new or decide to make a change, we are going to be uncomfortable. We are going to have hard work ahead of us. For a while, we’re going to have to wait on this damn one-lane prairie road until the entire population of Podunk City files past us. And it’s a pain in the ass. It feels like this horrible uncomfortable stage will last forever, and we are never going to get there. Wherever there is. Oh, I know why people don’t change. I’ve seen it in my own mirror.

But why do we want change? That’s the question. We want to be healthier. We want our children to be more independent. We want to make friends. We want to improve ourselves and our lives. We know, in the long run, these dusty prairie roads will be a lot easier to travel, once the work is done and there are two finished lanes on each side. We won’t have to wait behind Farmer Brown’s tractor, pulling our hair out. We can just pass him.

But right now, we’re under construction. And we’re eating that shit sandwich while we wait in line for the road to open out ahead of us again. Make mine with gluten-free bread, please. No cheese.

We hit a big milestone this week: Jack got into trouble at school. And… wait for it: It was for “not keeping his hands to himself.”

Translation: Jack was bothering other kids and getting into their space. JACK WAS BOTHERING OTHER KIDS AND GETTING INTO THEIR SPACE!

Until Monday, or maybe last Saturday, the most we could hope to see from Jack, with regard to playing with his peers, was allowing them to play in his general vicinity. The teacher and paraprofessional who talked with me had very grave expressions on their faces. The para, whom I’ll call Mrs. M, said that it looked like maybe Jack was trying to tickle other kids in the lunch room.

OK, let me break this down for those of you who don’t have an autistic kid. He was TICKLING other KIDS in the LUNCH ROOM–a room so vast and loud and full of cacophonous echoes that a year (or even a couple of months) ago would have had Jack rigidly sitting in his chair, eyes on his shoes, never saying a word to anyone. Ever.

I had to temper my response, of course. Those grave expressions. Because to be honest, I was FRICKING THRILLED! And Mrs. M did concede that it was good that he was interested in interacting with his peers, but that we just need to channel that interest into appropriate behaviors.

This is true. I do not want Jack to hurt other children. We always emphasize gentleness when we play with him at home, especially because he’s getting a lot bigger and stronger and can now actually harm us if he kicks us with the intent to wound or maim. Tickling him has become a dicey proposition, lately. Trouble is, the kid loves to be tickled.

So that’s maybe what he was doing, sharing his love of tickling with his new friends at the lunch table. But I still can’t get over the fact that he had NEW FRIENDS AT THE LUNCH TABLE!

Even if he didn’t actually hurt anyone, I also don’t want him to become the annoying kid that nobody likes because he’s always up in everyone’s grill. Of course I’m biased, but I think Jack has always been a very likable little boy. I wouldn’t want him to blow that streak, either.

We may have our new friends Rich and Leanne to thank, who came over for a cookout on Saturday with their son, Tristan. They’ve all just moved to Fort Collins from Wilmington, NC, where we moved here from. Rich took a few Creative Writing classes at UNCW, and my friend and former prof Nina introduced us via Facebook. And Tristan also happens to be the same age as Jack, and the only other five-year-old we’ve ever met who is even taller than Jack.

It was love at first sight. The boys jumped into the hammock together. Tristan started hiding behind a fold of fabric and yelling, “Boo!” – which sent Jack into violent gales of laughter. He did not want the game to end, even twenty minutes later, when Tristan was trying to eat his dinner. We were astounded by their obvious fondness for each other.

So maybe Jack was really just trying to get his school friends to be as fun as his new friend, Tristan. Here’s where autism can suck my dick. Because he can’t tell me why he was doing anything. He can only echo my question: “Did you tickle kids in the lunch room?” Whether or not he actually did so.

But there’s hope. Because for all of my agreement that, yes, of course, we want Jack to interact appropriately with his peers, not hurt them, not be a pain in the ass, etc.– I have to say that the prerequisite to appropriate interaction is ANY interaction. And until five days ago, that was not happening ever. At all. Ever.

To me, his exuberance is a sign that he’s already comfortable in his new school. He already loves his teachers, and he obviously wants to “love” his classmates, too. I’m pretty excited about my little troublemaker.

When I was in graduate school, I was on the staff of the literary journal, called Ecotone. I knew that the editor-in-chief was a well-known environmental writer, but otherwise, I didn’t know anything about what an ecotone was. The journal’s website had an interesting definition: “An ecotone is a transition zone between two adjacent ecological communities, containing the characteristic species of each. It is therefore a place of danger or opportunity, a testing ground.”

Graduate school ended up being its own ecotone, for me. It was a transition zone between a life I knew before and the life I didn’t know but wanted, ahead of me. I gave birth to my first and only child during those four years. I also lost my father, just a few months later. I had my first essay published. I made life-long friends and learned life-long lessons. I could never go back to the life I had had before experiencing that “place of danger or opportunity,” that “testing ground.”

After graduation, I discovered that my son had autism. A year later, I moved with my husband and my son to Colorado. My husband loved the mountains, and I had visited and loved it before. But it wasn’t until after we had lived there for two years before I made the connection between my literary journal experience and my new home.

The three of us were driving from our home in Fort Collins to the far western edge of the state, the town of Grand Junction, near the border of Utah. We went for the annual peach festival in Palisade. But what I got from it was sweeter than any peach pie. We traveled from the high plains of northern Colorado, next to the Front Range but not in the mountains, looking out onto a prairie sea, westward into foothills and canyons and alpine ecosystems above eight thousand feet, surrounded by aspen trees and evergreens, and then beyond, into the rugged high desert of the Western Slope of the Rocky Mountains. The town of Grand Junction, where we stayed, is surrounded by red rock towers and cliffs and mesas. Palisade, a few miles east, looks up onto a brown mesa that could be a huge pile of sand from its appearance from the interstate.

I realized that Colorado is an ecotone. Not just one, but many. Everything that the Western US offers, except maybe the redwoods, the coastline, and saguaro cactus, you can find in Colorado. High plains, semi-arid foothills, alpine mountains, desert. Colorado contains the Old West of cowboys and ranch hands, the Southwest of roasted chilies in the supermarket parking lot, ski country, and the dramatic red rock formations that carry on into southern Utah and Arizona. All of these ecosystems find their home and confluence in Colorado.

And I think that I might amend that definition I found those years ago. Because it seems to me that the overlap of different biomes, or ideas, or ways of life, contains both danger and opportunity. Because we live on the west end of town, my husband can go rock climbing during his lunch hour. Do I wish he’d prefer stamp collecting as a hobby? Sure, but he doesn’t love stamps. He loves climbing. So here, we have both the danger and the opportunity to live as we choose.

In a few days, my autistic son starts kindergarten. Here we are: another transition. Another change in the landscape. Despite the fact that he has attended preschool for three years, Monday marks another dividing line in our lives. He is frightened. I am frightened. I’m also sad and grieving. I can’t believe it’s happened so fast. He will have teachers trained to work specifically with kids on the autism spectrum. Everyone we have met at his new school seems not just on top of their game, but also happy to be there. But it’s a new, larger environment, full of risk and the unknown.

I can only hope that as we move forward, this new stage in our lives becomes a place of danger, yes, but also of greater opportunity than we have ever known before.

It’s been an interesting summer at the Guppy household. Lots of adventures and time to play with friends. But also, a lot of down time. Jack is currently memorizing the entire script of Finding Nemo during his quiet hours, and I’m totally okay with that. In fact, I’m watching along, most of the time. I’ve always loved this movie. I love the rich colors and the story, the characters, but most of all the message.

The message, as I get it, is this: Let your kids live. Let them live their lives and make mistakes and get bumps and bruises, because that’s how they learn. That’s how they grow. It’s really a message for the parents who take their kids to a movie like Finding Nemo. A friend of mine said, “That’s the only way to get the message to parents, is to make a kids’ movie about it, so they’ll take their kids.” She was talking about Nemo, but also about Inside Out, which has recently come out, and which I think every American should see. Without spoiling the plot, I’ll say that the message of that one is that we need all of our emotions to be a fully functioning human being, and that it’s actually not beneficial for anyone to be happy all of the time.

But I digress. Nemo is my little boy’s jam. And as I watch with him, I’m learning a lot. For instance, the title character is not, in fact, the hero. If you read it closely, the title is actually Finding Nemo. And whose job is that? The dad’s, of course. From a writer’s perspective, Nemo’s Dad, Marlin, is the real hero of the story. He’s the one who changes. And that’s what our protagonist needs to do, in any good story. He or she has to change.

Marlin is scarred by the death of Nemo’s mother, at the opening of the film. And he tries to pass on his fear of loss to his son. But here’s the catch. Nemo hasn’t really lost anyone. He never knew his mother. He’s just a kid. And he wants to learn and explore his world. It’s Marlin’s overbearing behavior that drives Nemo to rebel, which leads to his capture by a diver (P. Sherman, 42 Wallaby Way, Sydney), which is why Marlin has to find him in the first place.

I won’t recount the entire film for you, though I think Jack probably could, if you asked him. Suffice to say that Nemo’s capture is really the only thing that could ever propel Marlin into action, driving him away from the safety of the anemone, out into the open water. And through his various confrontations and struggles and triumphs, he becomes stronger and braver, and he eventually *gets* that Nemo needs for him to let go a little and let him grow.

As I’ve watched the film, I have realized the wealth of material that would be great to teach in an elementary classroom. I have found a bunch of lesson plans out there covering Nemo‘s content, but most if not all focus on the fields of science and marine biology. But I can see a whole unit of information: vocabulary (Mr. Ray alone could give us a month’s worth of vocab), math (How far is it from the Great Barrier Reef to Sydney? How many days do they have to get there?), geography (Where is Australia?), history (Are their underwater mines in the Pacific? Sunken battleships? Where did they come from?), art (Papier mache jellyfish, anyone?), creative writing (What would have happened if the divers never came? Imagine a conversation between Nemo and his school friends after the big adventure.), and even drama (scene studies, etc.). Then, maybe with older kids, you can talk about the change in Marlin and the life lesson he learns during his adventures.

In my Pinterest searches for other lesson plans, I found one for younger children that included the “life lesson” of the story, which, according to this plan, was that children should obey their parents, because their parents know better. Um. What? Were you watching the same movie I was watching?

This is where the finding a clue part comes in. We think of kids’ movies as just that: for kids. We think they’re fluffy and light and cute and entertaining. But we don’t take them or anything they might have to say very seriously. And that’s to our detriment. Because obviously someone took the story, the animation, the graphics, the characters very seriously. They invested millions of hours and millions of dollars in them. The people who created Nemo (and Inside Out) are, you know, adults. Professionals. Drawing Nemo is their day job. It pays their rent and feeds their families. This isn’t a joke to them.

Why should it be a joke to us? What would happen if we sat down and actually watched and listened to these films? How would we change as parents? As people?

Because, well, here’s the real thing. Jack starts Kindergarten in a month, and I sure could learn to let go, along with Marlin. Jack needs to live and learn and grow, and I need to let him. There. I said it. So help me, Disney.

I have several dear friends who are in deep grief right now. A lost father, a lost mother, a dad with Alzheimer’s. One friend commented that it’s like being in a club. And I replied that it’s a club you never want to belong to, but once you do, you’re at least glad for the company.

In so many ways, it’s like becoming a parent. You really don’t know what it’s like until you live through it. You can’t. You couldn’t possibly. Interestingly, I was so thankful to have friends in the parent club before I had Jack, because I benefited so much from their experience. But I was late to the game for that club. I was one of the last of my friends to have children, so the club was already full when I arrived.

But with my parents’ deaths, I was the first. Or one of the first. When my mom died, I was not quite twenty-nine years old. This doesn’t put me in the category of people who have lost a parent as children. But twenty-nine is still pretty young to lose a parent. I think I had two other friends, both from college. But they were guys, and they had both lost dads. I didn’t know any women my age who were losing their moms. It was a very lonely club.

Thankfully, I had older friends, teachers, mentors, and counselors, who had traveled the road I was on. It didn’t make it go away. It didn’t make the emptiness any less vast. It didn’t make the terrain I was covering any easier to slog through. Step after clumsy, painful step. But the company was more helpful than I could say. Like the lyrics from an old Police song: “It seems I’m not alone in being alone.”

At my twentieth high school reunion, a friend pointed out another classmate of ours across the room and whispered in my ear, “She just buried her mother today.” I had buried my father the day before, and I felt defensive. “Oh, I wonder what that’s like!” I said, sarcasm dripping from my tongue. She rolled her eyes at me. “That’s what I mean, stupid.”

Oh. So here we are. We’re in our early-to-mid-forties (depending how you count). We get older. Our parents get older. It’s the way of things. That doesn’t make it easy. But it makes it, somehow, easier to handle. To know that we’re part of a larger experience called life. Which includes death. Including the death of people we love. Including our own.

One of the hardest parts of losing a parent is that there is now no cushion between ourselves and the end of ourselves. There’s no buffer. There it is. We’re next. And then our children are born, and they get older, which means we must be getting older. Jerry Seinfeld once said: “Make no mistake about why these babies are here. They’re here to replace us.”

Jack just graduated from preschool last month. He’s five. He’ll start Kindergarten in the fall, and I can’t believe it. I can’t stand it. I blinked, and here we are. I’ll blink again, and he’ll graduate from high school. How did this happen to me? It feels impossible. But here we are.

Groucho Marx famously said that he didn’t want to belong to any club that would accept him as a member. But this club accepts everyone. Whether we like it or not.

I don’t know anyone who “likes” belonging to the club of orphans. Or the club of people who lose the ones we love and who eventually die. But we are also a club of people who hold each other up, who send cards and flowers and love to our friends who need it most. Which, at one point or another, is all of us. Not such a bad club, really.

We’ve been planning for months now to do Jack’s potty training during Spring break. We even told his teacher at the beginning of the school year, in August. We knew we’d be traveling at Christmas, and the idea of an autistic four-year-old in an airplane bathroom seemed like one of the worst kinds of hell. So we planned on Spring break, which was this past week.

And for the first time maybe ever, Jack seemed ready, or as ready as he could be. He’s started taking off his diaper at night. He even threw poop onto his closet wall, which was especially fun. We’ve been doing a lot of mid-line exercises with him (trampoline, exercise ball, clapping, etc.), and he’s seemed increasingly aware of and interested in his own body. He wants to “lie on” everything, which means putting his belly on tables, dinner plates, and even (sometimes, interestingly) people. All of these are good signs. It seemed great.

And I had a plan. I follow a blog called Autism Daddy, and he has posted the routine that worked for his son, Kyle, who is severely autistic and epileptic, totally non-verbal. He said that their plan took four days. So that’s what I was banking on. Autism Daddy says four days. Autism Daddy says four days.

Luckily, the weather was beautiful last weekend, so on Sunday, I started our week with a naked day in the backyard. Jack ran around and played and peed on the bricks in the backyard. I praised him, because until then, honestly, I didn’t know if he would pee out of a diaper (pull-up). The next morning when I got him up, I found he had removed his diaper, peed on the floor of his room, and put the diaper back on. So the kid must be ready.

On Monday, I held off on the hard-core potty training plan from Autism Daddy one more day, because it was another gorgeous day, and so we had three hours in the backyard, pantsless and diaper-less. He peed again and then dropped his toy elephant in the pee puddle. When he reached to pick it up, we stopped him and rinsed off the elephant first. We told him not to touch the pee because it was dirty.

Tuesday was D-day. The weather turned cold and cloudy. No naked outside time. We started about an hour after he woke up, after breakfast. I took off his diaper and put him in “big boy” underpants: Hanes tighty-whiteys. Then every fifteen minutes, I took him to the bathroom, had him sit on the regular potty, and watch whatever video he requested, as long as it was at least five minutes long. Then I filled out the chart I had printed: time, pee, poop, duration, accidents. When he got up, I gave him two M&Ms and let him play for ten or so minutes until the next attempt.

On Wednesday, I added water to the routine, and a friend gave me the kiddie seat she used on top of the regular toilet seat because her son, like Jack, had been afraid to fall in. Those two additions seemed to help. And I have to hand it to my kiddo. He never once complained about getting onto the potty. He just seemed completely uninterested in actually peeing into it. But he got to watch videos every fifteen minutes and two M&Ms per sitting, so he wasn’t complaining.

Every day, so far, there were about two or three accidents a day, in between our timed potty seatings. The same was true on Thursday. And we were running out of underpants. I told him, after the second accident, that one more and we’d have to switch back to diapers. This news upset him. Because he liked the underpants, and because I think he understood me to be threatening him with diapers as a punishment. And so he didn’t pee at all the rest of the evening, even though I could see him squirm and act uncomfortable. I didn’t know how to explain it to him. And now he was scared to pee at all. Ever.

Jeez. Just mail the Mother of the Year award to my home address, please. I started to worry about him. Would he get a urinary tract infection from holding his pee? He was very anxious at bedtime, and cried a lot. I went in after we had tucked him in and he was crying again. I curled around him on his bed, and almost instantly, he started to nod off. I heard his breathing get deeper and more regular, and I slipped off the bed and headed to the door. “We’ll keep all the louds off,” he said quietly as I opened the door. “Yes,” I promised. “We’ll keep all the louds off.”

Brian went in an hour or so later, and Jack was awake again but quiet. His diaper was super-full of pee. And when I went in Friday morning, it was full again. So he had peed in his sleep. Thank goodness. But he was still pretty anxious about the potty. He wanted to cuddle a lot that morning, and I had spent some sleepless time the night before asking how I could help him. I had gotten the sense that I needed to smooth out my approach and even retreat a little. Give him space. Allow him to find his own way through.

So I did my best Friday morning. I held him. I kept him to the potty schedule, but I didn’t pressure him. Then on his second trip in there, Jack got very agitated and squirmy. I could tell that he needed to go but didn’t want to. Finally, I said, “Let’s give it a try,” and I helped him onto the potty. He was very anxious, but he couldn’t stop the trickle of pee. I held him as he cried, and when I heard the drops hit, I hugged him tighter and cheered him. “Jack, you did it! You went peepee in the potty! You did it! What a good job!” I praised him over and over. Brian heard and came upstairs and joined the praise chorus. Then the tears dried. Jack flushed the potty, and we fed him ice cream.

He went once more that morning, still very anxious, but no tears, this time. Then more ice cream, a special treat. I could tell he was still stopping the flow. Only a little bit trickled out each time. He asked to go outside without pants, and thankfully, the weather cooperated, so we went outside. Now, even the outside pee was causing him anxiety and not coming out freely. And later that morning, he had an accident on the couch, which I missed, being in the other room. He asked me to go to the potty — another first. So I took him in there and realized the underpants were wet. After he sat for ten minutes, with no pee in the potty, I let him get up, and he asked for ice cream. I agreed to the ice cream before I saw the pee on the couch.

That’s when I knew that it wasn’t over. Jack had peed on the fourth day of training, so I was ready to believe Autism Daddy on the four-day promise. But alas. I texted my friend of the kiddie potty seat, and she assured me that it was far from over, but that it would eventually end. She went on to tell me that her kids are still in the process of potty training, at various stages. She urged me to be patient with Jack and with myself, because it’s a hard enough process without freaking out about the timing.

There’s an old joke: If you want God to laugh, make plans. And I think I’ve given Him (or whoever) a few good chuckles this week. It’s not the potty training that went down the shitter. It’s just my idea that it would be quick and easy and over in four days. I don’t blame Autism Daddy. I’m sure it really worked for them. He doesn’t strike me as someone who would whitewash the details. And I’m also pretty sure they were more diligent about the short intervals between attempts, etc.

But that’s not us. It’s not Jack and it’s not me. So now I’m hanging in there for the longer haul. He’s gone twice now in the potty. He’ll do it again. He might be scared, but we’re not abandoning all hope here. We’re just abandoning unrealistic expectations. Funny, the OT we saw in February said he wasn’t anywhere close to being ready for potty training, and he’s closer than we thought. And tonight, he sang “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” to himself after bedtime. This afternoon, another lovely day, he played in the backyard with the hose. He peed on the grass and asked Brian to hold him afterward.

The tunnel will end. And meanwhile, we’ll do our best to relax and enjoy the ride.

It took me a while to actually sit down and write this, two weeks after Jack’s fifth birthday. It’s all still true.

You look the most like your dad: blond hair, tall and thin. But your eyes remind me of me and of my mom. Your rose-gold hair from infancy has changed to flax. Your face is longer and thinner. Gone are the chubby baby cheeks, the fat spiders of hands. You underwent surgery at fifteen months because you were born with just one testicle. You cried and cried when you came out from the anesthesia. We held you and cried, too, feeling helpless and broken, unable to take away your suffering. The nurse gave you one dose of pain medicine before we left, and when we got home, you slept for three hours. When you woke up, you were your own cheerful self, as if nothing had happened.

It’s your good cheer and your laughter that remind me of my side of the family, especially my dad, your Granddaddy Jim. You love to laugh, and you love to make us laugh. “You’re funny,” is a high compliment from you. Last night, you were looking for the brown owl I made for you years ago now, the one with only one eye, because the other fell off or was pulled off by you. Your dad was helping you look for it, and you found it before he did. You stayed silent, watching your dad look for the owl that you already had. When he finally turned around and saw it next to you on the bed, you started to laugh. You may not be able to talk very well yet, but you sure know how to laugh.

You were diagnosed with autism when you were two-and-a-half, half of your lifetime ago, now. You still struggle with speaking, but you understand much more. In the fall, you will start kindergarten at a school that specializes in helping kids with autism, and their school mascot is the owl. It seems like the perfect place for you. I don’t think I’m ready yet to put you on a bus, so I will drive you to school for another year, or two.

We’re potty training you this week, and you like the “big boy” underpants, preferring them over bulky diapers. Once you figure out how to sense when it’s time to go, I predict there will be no stopping you. I rejoice every time you reach a new level, every time you insist on doing something yourself: “Want Jack will do it!” And I’m also a little sad, because the baby version of you is gone, growing fainter in the distance with every new step you take into the world. Just this morning, you eschewed the booster seat, insisting to sit in the “big chair.” I praised your big-boy move as I sadly removed the booster and set it on the floor. Another point of no return.

You still love to be held, and you love music. You love to be sung to. Your favorite toys (apart from the owls) are the ones that play music. You memorize the songs and sing them to yourself at night, before you fall asleep. Whenever you hear a new one that you love, you listen to it over and over until you have it down pat. Your grandmother, your dad’s mom, is good at introducing new tunes that you like. But sometimes I come up with an old jingle or song that you love, and you have me sing it over and over, over and over. Your dad is a musician, and it looks like you’ll follow his lead, in your own time.

At the same time that I miss your sweet chubby baby self, I delight in the new, strong, independent boy sprouting up out of himself. You love basketball, and your aim is keen. You’re so good that when you miss one shot in ten or fifteen, you get angry. You think it’s supposed to hit the net every single time. You don’t know yet that even for the professionals, one miss in ten is pretty damn good. Be patient with yourself. Be kind. You have no idea how truly gifted you are. You only have yourself to compare to, right now. I hope that practice and growth and maturity will show you that everyone fails sometimes. Everyone misses the basket. Everyone falls down. It doesn’t make you a failure. Failure is to stop trying. Just get back up and try again. And hear the crowd go, “Wow.”

I don’t know about you, but one of my biggest problems is getting in my own way. With everything. Parenting, writing, living, you name it. So one of the best things I can think of for myself and my own sanity is to practice getting *out* of my own way. I learned how to do this at healing school, using a meditation called “Basking in the Light.”

One of my classmates observed to our teacher that what he was teaching us in class seemed to be mostly how to get out of our own way. And my teacher, who didn’t laugh like the rest of us, nodded gravely. “You have no idea,” he said, “How much of this is just that.” Then he taught us the meditation, which I’ll try to outline here.

Here’s a picture of the Tree of Life, or in Hebrew, the etz chaim, from Kabbalah:

It’s a long story, but each of the points on the tree, except for that very bottom one, emit light. They’re called vessels of light. But that bottom point (not really a point, more of a gateway), is called Malkhut, and Malkhut doesn’t make its own light. Its only job is to reflect the light from the vessels above it. Just like how our moon reflects light from the sun. It doesn’t emit its own light, but it can still light up a field at midnight, when it’s full. That’s the idea of Malkhut.

I typically think of this as “the Malkhut meditation,” rather than “basking in the light,” mostly just because it’s easier to remember. But lately, I’ve taken to calling it “the rock on the floor.” See, you can actually superimpose the tree pictured above onto the human body, so that each part of the tree corresponds to an area of the body. For instance, Tiferet in the middle of the tree, would be located at your heart. And below Tiferet is Yesod, which corresponds to the “root chakra” or genitals. Which makes Malkhut, if you’re sitting in a chair, the rock on the floor beneath you.

So for this meditation, you basically take the place of the rock on the floor. The mantra goes, “I am Malkhut. I have no light of my own. My only job is to reflect the lights of Heaven.” Images to help with visualizing this state include the moon, or a large rock in sunlight, or even a still, clear lake, which reflects perfectly the environment around it.

I repeat these words over and over and keep breathing deeply, and eventually, most of the time, I can feel myself sink into that imaginary rock on the floor under my chair. And then all of the striving, all of the drama, all of the tension of daily life no longer belongs to me. It doesn’t hook me anymore. I’m just the rock on the floor. What do I care about the chair, or the way the person sitting in the chair looks, or whether their hair is combed?

A similar exercise my teacher suggested was next time you go to a movie, right in the middle of the action, remind yourself that what you’re watching is just light on a flat screen. When you remember the flat screen, the drama just collapses. It doesn’t catch you up in its story anymore.

I’m not advocating the elimination of films or stories. I’m a writer, after all. But think of yourself as the screen. If all of the drama and tension of my life is only the reflection on a (three-dimensional, holographic) screen, maybe I don’t have to own it, anymore. Or maybe it doesn’t have to own me.

This practice has brought me a lot of peace of mind, and at least for a few minutes a day, I can get out of my own way. And once I get familiar with how it feels — how *blissful* it feels — I can make it more of a regular habit.

When I was a senior in high school, my friend Julie gave me a graduation gift, a book called Ragman, by Walter Wangerin, a Christian writer and father. In this book is an essay Wangerin wrote about his son Matthew, who forgave him once for losing his shit on him. In the story, Wangerin compares this forgiveness from a young boy to the first miracle Jesus performed, turning water into wine. According to Wangerin’s account of the Gospel story, some people at the wedding mumbled among themselves: “The water had no right to be wine. Unless God be in Him.”

Yesterday, I had a bad parental moment. I have several every day, if I’m totally honest, but this one resounds in my mind, because I experienced the miracle Wangerin wrote about in that essay I read twenty-five years ago. It was time to get Jack up from his afternoon nap, a task usually accomplished by Brian, after he’s finished his work day. But we have all been brutally sick with a cold, and he needed a break to rest. So I went in. I was already grumbling about half a dozen tiny inconveniences, including the cat following me around the kitchen, yowling as though starving. (If you’ve ever seen my cat, you know he’s not likely to starve any time soon.)

Then I went into Jack’s room, still simmering with annoyance, and he didn’t want me. He wanted his daddy. Because he was used to having Daddy. He got loud about it. He was upset because our bedroom door was closed. He wanted to go into “the white room.” He wanted to see “two shirts” (both Brian and me). I recall these small phrases, because they were the loudest, his sentences crescendo-ing into whiny shouts. His diaper was also poopy, and the room reeked. Finally, I snapped at him. JACK! You cannot go into the white room! There’s only one shirt! I have to change your diaper! And he started to cry.

I felt like three pieces of shit. I somehow got him to lie down (not by force; I was already sorry and chastened) and changed his diaper in silence as he whimpered and cried. When I started doing his OT exercises, he had quieted enough for me to say, “I’m sorry, buddy. Mommy messed up.” Then he stopped crying completely. He giggled. “Mommy messed up,” he repeated. Then he laughed again.

And suddenly, it was over. My anger and his anxiety and everything just evaporated. It. Was. Gone. He fixed everything. I didn’t know what to say or do. I laughed a little and repeated it again. “That’s right. Mommy messed up.” And he laughed again, and then got up and went out to the living room to play.

This, folks, is what we call forgiveness. Real forgiveness. Not the forgiveness that I wring out of my stingy heart on rare occasions. The forgiveness that says, “Well, OK, I guess I can forgive you, but that means I have leverage for next time.” The forgiveness that doesn’t actually forget the injury. That’s not forgiveness. That’s blackmail. I could learn a few things from my five-year-old boy.

And that’s where Wangerin comes back in. His words echo in my heart. Here they are, so you can see for yourself:

That child! That child had no right to forgive me so! Where did he get the knowledge? Where did he get the maturity, the might of an ageless mercy, the transfiguring power to make me his son, and to make his son free? No, this was not logical. The sequence, somewhere between my sin and his charity, was breached; some other cause had cracked into the process: he was wine! And I–sweetly limp in my chair–whispered, “Except God be in you.”

I’d like to somehow capture that amazing gift of being present with what is. To allow myself to fully and vividly feel grief or anger or sadness, and then just let it go. Maybe I used to have it, when I was little. Maybe all children can model that full presence in the moment. I think most of us adults could benefit from it. We forget about the miracles of life. The tiny and huge miracles of letting go. But I, for one, would love to remember.

We recently took Jack to a private Occupational Therapist (OT) to supplement the therapies he receives at school. This guy is very well known in town and seems to have the only private pediatric practice in town. There are several places in Denver, but for wee Fort Collins, this seems to be it. This OT has a great reputation. When I brought up his name to Jack’s speech therapist, and then to Jack’s classroom teacher, they both lit up. Oh, this guy is awesome.

Well. Not so awesome. On our first (and it turns out, only) visit, he brought out a toy that scared Jack. That is not so unusual. Jack is scared of any number of things. And recently, oddly, he has become very anxious about spinning, whirring toys, which used to be HIS JAM.

When we moved away from Wilmington, North Carolina, our dear friend Lisa gave Jack a handheld fan with Woody from Toy Story on it. Push a little red button, and the small yellow foam blades spin around. Jack LOVES fans and things that spin, and he adored this gift. He carried it with him wherever we went, all the way across the country. It was “the cowboy fan” that got us through many a tight spot with Jack. But now it terrifies him.

Don’t ask me why. His babysitter, his speech therapist at school, gave him spinning lights and fans, thinking he would love them. But he hates them, now. Not sure what happened, but something triggered a startle reaction in him, and he never went back.

So anyway, this new OT brings out a spinning toy, and Jack freaks out. The OT tries to encourage him to interact with the toy, and Jack runs to me. I try to encourage him to go along with the exercise, and he finally runs to the corner of the room, facing away from both of us, and screams. So I figure we’re done. I go to hold him, and the OT stops me. He keeps going with this exercise, and Jack gets more and more frantic, and finally bursts into tears.

Finally, I pick up my boy and hold him on my lap, and he continues to cry, scream, and beg me for assurance. “The scary toy is gone. The scary toy is gone.” He repeats it over and over, his eyes on me, silently urging me to repeat his statements, so that he’ll know that they’re true. And I do. “It’s gone, baby,” I say. “It’s gone.”

This may be the end of it, except that throughout the above exchange with Jack, the OT is nattering at me in an insistent voice, telling me not to repeat Jack’s statement because then it lodges it in his mind, and he perseverates on it. Then he goes on about an example of a kid saying, “I have no friends.” And the parent says, “Of course you have friends.” Which dismisses and negates the child’s feelings. I look at him quizzically. This situation is nothing like his example. Does he even know what he’s saying? Or is it what he’s seeing that’s off?

So I have Jack, my sweet, terrified son, screaming in my face, and a skinny, white-haired hyper man behind him, telling me in a Jersey accent about how I’m doing it wrong and not helping my kid. I almost walked out right then. (Not for the Jersey accent. I happen to love the accent, and many people who speak with it.) But I didn’t. I saw it through. I nodded my head, waiting for the lecture to finish and for Jack to calm down. And finally, about ten minutes later, Jack is calm enough to engage in one more activity, but he insists on doing it from my lap. I don’t see how this is helping.

The next step, the OT tells me, is for him to sit down with Brian and me and discuss his findings from Jack’s “assessment.” For one reason or another, the meeting gets postponed for nearly a month, and by the time we meet with him, face to face, it is early February. I have pretty much made up my mind about this person, and Brian has disliked him from the first phone conversation because he uses his name to much: “Let me explain, Brian, blah blah blah.” It reminded him of the Bible group in college, where people used the name Jesus or God about a dozen times in a short prayer. It smacks of insincerity, of trying too hard, a little bit of a used car salesman.

So we went into the meeting with the agreement that unless this OT guy blows us away and changes our minds about him, he’s a no-go. Here’s the thing. In some ways, he did blow us away. He had good ideas about Jack’s sensory systems, and sound practices for helping to regulate them. Get him on a trampoline four times a day. Get him on a swing as often as you can. Do a “helicopter dance,” where Jack turns three times in each direction, at least once a day. These exercises, which strengthen Jack’s vestibular and proprioceptive systems, will help Jack to regulate his brain and help him calm down more easily. He noted that when Jack had visited the first time, he looked everywhere, taking in the environment visually because he couldn’t sense it accurately with his body.

He showed us a chart, using Calvin and Hobbs drawings, illustrating the range of arousal states, with Calvin slouching on a chair at zero, and jumping all over the place at ten, his tiny body surrounded by a halo of arrows pointing in different directions. In the middle, he told us, is where our best learning and communication happen. Without regulation, he explained, kids “like Jack” go back and forth between zero and ten, with little or no time spent in the middle of the scale. Once, when he left the room for a moment, Brian pointed toward the OT and back at the picture of Calvin at ten, with the arrows bouncing around. Yes, this man is definitely on the manic side. But he has good ideas.

My moment of clarity came when the OT proclaimed that the exercises we do with him every day at home will make the biggest difference, over time. “I can throw ideas out to you all day,” he said. Yes, I thought. I’m sure you can. But a million frenetic ideas won’t help as much as three or four good ones. So I figured if we can implement the suggestions he has already made, it may do Jack more good than coming to his office once a week and enduring the word vomit that emits from the OT pretty much constantly.

And here are a few other things we noticed. When the OT talked about the concrete-objective stage in cognitive development, I said, “Oh, from Piaget.” And he looked surprised. He seemed to have the idea that parents are not very smart, and that we have to be convinced to do things correctly. He also said something at one point about “forcing” kids to do things they don’t like. I understand that things like brushing teeth and putting a coat on when it’s cold are often things we have to cajole our kids into doing. But if Jack doesn’t like OT, fears it, talks about it when we’re not there like it’s a danger, that’s not a good thing.

We have been on this road long enough, and have worked with enough therapists, that I can get a pretty good sense pretty quickly whether a given relationship is going to work out. The best therapists and teachers for Jack have been those who have not only put him at ease, but have reassured us, as well. Those who have helped us to learn how to help Jack without making us feel like we’re horrible parents and doing it wrong. This guy may have a great reputation, and I’ve heard he’s very effective with a lot of kids. But I don’t think Jack is one of those kids.

And this brings me to my final point. We are seeking help from an OT because he is an expert on autism. But Brian and I are experts on Jack. And if our expertise and experience are not included in the discussion, we need to look elsewhere.

On the flip side, last week, we also toured the school where Jack will attend Kindergarten in the fall, in a full-day autism program. The director there showed us around the school, and the classroom where Jack will spend a lot of time next year. While we were there, one of the kids got upset, and Brian’s hackles went up. “Jack doesn’t do well if he’s pushed too hard,” he told her. “He’ll only get upset and shut down.” The director nodded and said, “We have found that every kid is different. And every kid needs a different approach to help him or her learn effectively.” Another moment of clarity.

Add to that the school’s mascot is the Owl. The one who sees in the dark. And Jack’s current favorite animal in the universe. And a symbol I often associate with my mom. Oh. Things are looking up.